The communications industry is rapidly changing to adjust to emerging technologies and ever increasing customer demand. This customer demand for new applications and increased performance of existing applications is driving communications network and system providers to employ networks and systems having greater speed and capacity (e.g., greater bandwidth). In trying to achieve these goals, a common approach taken by many communications providers is to use packet switching technology. Increasingly, public and private communications networks are being built and expanded using various packet technologies, such as Internet Protocol (IP). Note, nothing described or referenced in this document is admitted as prior art to this application unless explicitly so stated.
FIG. 1 illustrates a standard prior art network configuration 100 with two hosts 101, 110 each located on two different portions 102, 109 of a network which are bridged by switches 104 and 107. At any time, only one of these two switches 104, 107 should be forwarding packets between these two different network portions 102, 109 to avoid a forwarding a loop. For example, one of the ports corresponding to links 105, 108 should be in a blocking state so that switch 104, 107 does not lean an incorrect location of a node or other networked device; otherwise, both switches 104 and 107 will be reading source address of packets and updating its forwarding table accordingly, which will typically cause the learning of the wrong location of host-A 101. If the port corresponding to link 108 is in the blocking state, switches 104, 107 will correctly learn the location of host-A 101 based on a packet sent from host-a 101 to host-B 110 as both switches will see and learn the source media access control (MAC) address based on the packet being received on ports corresponding to links 103 and 106, respectively. If, however, the port corresponding to link 108 is not in the blocking state (which should never happen, but may occasionally occur due to a hardware or software error), switch 107 will also see and learn the source MAC address also on the port corresponding to link 108. Thus, switch 107 may attempt to forward packets to host-A 101 via the wrong port and onto link 108.